Blair S. Paulsen
Well-known member
- Joined
- Dec 28, 2006
- Messages
- 5,503
- Reaction score
- 34
- Points
- 48
- Location
- San Diego, CA
- Website
- www.alacritymedia.com
There's a good chance that tomorrow (or very soon thereafter) RED will provide specifics on not just the RedRay players but also specifications for what to feed it. It will, at least briefly, be the de facto standard for 4K distribution outside of the DCI spec. It got me thinking about how technical standards are like unions; great intentions, hidden agendas, mixed results. IAC, at this point in the development of our civilization, control of the technological high ground is serious high stakes capitalism (look up cellular bandwidth auctions on Google).
We'll start with the ugly, because its everywhere. Over compressed MPEG-2 streams purporting to be HD at under 2mb/s is bad enough but as a RU poster noted recently most of the time that compression step is one of several that happen between mastering and viewing. (sarcasm alert) Aren't we lucky that we have standards to insure consistently excellent picture quality…
That gets us to bad. I'd like to blame the greedy bastards who listened to their customers and delivered more variety and greater convenience because the surveys said that's what they cared about. Picture quality was always down the list, then of course when people are buying cars they usually pay more attention to the paint color than the brakes, but I digress. I suppose they could improve their service delivery capabilities - launch more satellites, run more miles of fiber, etc but that might cut into this years bonuses…
The good, we are at the dawn of the 4K era for mass distribution. We can do it better this time than when the ATSC created 18 formats for HD (thanks for clearing things up). I don't know any specifics about what format(s) RedRay will support, whether RED is planning to propagate a proprietary authoring tool and whether the larger industry will adapt any format that has RED anywhere near it (evidently when you disrupt an industry it pisses some people off, who knew?).
My sincere hope is for an easy to access and widely adopted 4K distribution format with at least 10 bit color, a strict limit on how much it can be compressed and a file interchange capacity that makes recompressing unnecessary.
This is RED's moment to shake up distribution with RedRay and whatever codec it utilizes. If the bit rate to quality equation hits the sweet spot it has the potential to bring the 4K future closer to the present faster than anything else.
IMO RED has another important card to play that could really accelerate the availability of high quality content for the 4K universe. We need a general duty, open source, mastering format for 4K that hits the sweet spot between quality and data load. I dread a future where 4K mastering is either DPX or OpenEXR for the high end and some >50mb/s version of what should be a distribution format like AVC, H.264, etc for everybody else. Right now ProRes 4444 at 4K and CineForm 4K are the mastering options and each poses significant risk for shelf assets due to proprietary control.
Perhaps mastering to the distribution format in the Red Ray spec will have to do and maybe they will offer a higher bit rate variant that would be legitimate "master" quality...
Cheers - #19
We'll start with the ugly, because its everywhere. Over compressed MPEG-2 streams purporting to be HD at under 2mb/s is bad enough but as a RU poster noted recently most of the time that compression step is one of several that happen between mastering and viewing. (sarcasm alert) Aren't we lucky that we have standards to insure consistently excellent picture quality…
That gets us to bad. I'd like to blame the greedy bastards who listened to their customers and delivered more variety and greater convenience because the surveys said that's what they cared about. Picture quality was always down the list, then of course when people are buying cars they usually pay more attention to the paint color than the brakes, but I digress. I suppose they could improve their service delivery capabilities - launch more satellites, run more miles of fiber, etc but that might cut into this years bonuses…
The good, we are at the dawn of the 4K era for mass distribution. We can do it better this time than when the ATSC created 18 formats for HD (thanks for clearing things up). I don't know any specifics about what format(s) RedRay will support, whether RED is planning to propagate a proprietary authoring tool and whether the larger industry will adapt any format that has RED anywhere near it (evidently when you disrupt an industry it pisses some people off, who knew?).
My sincere hope is for an easy to access and widely adopted 4K distribution format with at least 10 bit color, a strict limit on how much it can be compressed and a file interchange capacity that makes recompressing unnecessary.
This is RED's moment to shake up distribution with RedRay and whatever codec it utilizes. If the bit rate to quality equation hits the sweet spot it has the potential to bring the 4K future closer to the present faster than anything else.
IMO RED has another important card to play that could really accelerate the availability of high quality content for the 4K universe. We need a general duty, open source, mastering format for 4K that hits the sweet spot between quality and data load. I dread a future where 4K mastering is either DPX or OpenEXR for the high end and some >50mb/s version of what should be a distribution format like AVC, H.264, etc for everybody else. Right now ProRes 4444 at 4K and CineForm 4K are the mastering options and each poses significant risk for shelf assets due to proprietary control.
Perhaps mastering to the distribution format in the Red Ray spec will have to do and maybe they will offer a higher bit rate variant that would be legitimate "master" quality...
Cheers - #19
